Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons


Book Description

A step-by-step program that shows parents, simply and clearly, how to teach their child to read in just 20 minutes a day.




What the Best College Teachers Do


Book Description

What makes a great teacher great? Who are the professors students remember long after graduation? This book, the conclusion of a fifteen-year study of nearly one hundred college teachers in a wide variety of fields and universities, offers valuable answers for all educators. The short answer is—it’s not what teachers do, it’s what they understand. Lesson plans and lecture notes matter less than the special way teachers comprehend the subject and value human learning. Whether historians or physicists, in El Paso or St. Paul, the best teachers know their subjects inside and out—but they also know how to engage and challenge students and to provoke impassioned responses. Most of all, they believe two things fervently: that teaching matters and that students can learn. In stories both humorous and touching, Ken Bain describes examples of ingenuity and compassion, of students’ discoveries of new ideas and the depth of their own potential. What the Best College Teachers Do is a treasure trove of insight and inspiration for first-year teachers and seasoned educators.




The Missing Course


Book Description

“What a delight to read David Gooblar’s book on teaching and learning. He wraps important insights into a story of discovery and adventure.” —Ken Bain, author of What the Best College Teachers Do College is changing, but the way we train academics is not. Most professors are taught to be researchers first and teachers a distant second, even as scholars are increasingly expected to excel in the classroom. There has been a revolution in teaching and learning over the past generation, and we now have a whole new understanding of how the brain works and how students learn. The Missing Course offers a field guide to the state-of-the-art in teaching and learning and is packed with insights to help students learn in any discipline. Wary of the folk wisdom of the faculty lounge, David Gooblar builds his lessons on the newest findings and years of experience. From active-learning strategies to ways of designing courses to get students talking, The Missing Course walks you through the fundamentals of the student-centered classroom, one in which the measure of success is not how well you lecture but how much your students actually learn. “Warm and empirically based, comprehensive but accessible, student-centered and also scientific. We’re so lucky to have Gooblar as a guide.” —Sarah Rose Cavanagh, author of The Spark of Learning “Goes beyond critique, offering a series of activities, approaches, and strategies that instructors can implement. His wise and necessary book is a long defense of the idea that a university can be a site of the transformation of self and society.” —Los Angeles Review of Books “An invaluable source of insight and wisdom on what it means to work with students. We’ve needed this book for a long time.” —John Warner, author of Why They Can’t Write




100-Day Leaders


Book Description

"In 100-Day Leaders: Making a Difference Right Now in Every School, authors Robert Eaker and Douglas Reeves suggest a new way of thinking about leadership. Whether the project is large in scope, such as changing the orientation of a school to Professional Learning Communities, or smaller in scope, such as the development of formative assessments or new grading practices in a single semester, the 100-Day Leader brings a sense of daily accomplishment, feedback, mid-course corrections, focus, and encouragement to the organization--from the classroom to the board room. Eaker and Reeves offer an integrated approach in which the leader sees connections that may not be apparent to others in the organization. Curriculum, assessment, facilities, transportation, food service, teacher evaluation, board relationships and a host of other complex interactions are at the heart of the 100-Day Leader. This book offers a practical guide for leaders at every level to make immediate transformations in culture, practice, and performance"--




Academically Adrift


Book Description

In spite of soaring tuition costs, more and more students go to college every year. A bachelor’s degree is now required for entry into a growing number of professions. And some parents begin planning for the expense of sending their kids to college when they’re born. Almost everyone strives to go, but almost no one asks the fundamental question posed by Academically Adrift: are undergraduates really learning anything once they get there? For a large proportion of students, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s answer to that question is a definitive no. Their extensive research draws on survey responses, transcript data, and, for the first time, the state-of-the-art Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test administered to students in their first semester and then again at the end of their second year. According to their analysis of more than 2,300 undergraduates at twenty-four institutions, 45 percent of these students demonstrate no significant improvement in a range of skills—including critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing—during their first two years of college. As troubling as their findings are, Arum and Roksa argue that for many faculty and administrators they will come as no surprise—instead, they are the expected result of a student body distracted by socializing or working and an institutional culture that puts undergraduate learning close to the bottom of the priority list. Academically Adrift holds sobering lessons for students, faculty, administrators, policy makers, and parents—all of whom are implicated in promoting or at least ignoring contemporary campus culture. Higher education faces crises on a number of fronts, but Arum and Roksa’s report that colleges are failing at their most basic mission will demand the attention of us all.




Cheating Lessons


Book Description

Cheating Lessons is a guide to tackling academic dishonesty at its roots. James Lang analyzes the features of course design and classroom practice that create cheating opportunities, and empowers teachers to build more effective learning environments. Instructors who curb academic dishonesty become better educators in other ways as well.




A Lesson Learned


Book Description

There are no losses in life just lessons learned. Every experience, trial, and pain teaches us something we never knew about ourselves. Author Jeevan Brown dives into the lives of 16 college students as they experience the trials and tribulations that ultimately made them the men and women they are today. Based on true events, these stories are raw, uncut, funny, nostalgic, and emotional. From near death experiences, sports, rape, drugs, racism, STD's, finances, fashion, relationships and more. Each story gives a detailed account of the pivotal aspects followed by advice, statistics and the lessons the main characters learned from each experience. This book may help somebody dealing with the same dynamic with hopes that they'll overcome the unfortunate circumstances that he or she is in.




Grown and Flown


Book Description

PARENTING NEVER ENDS. From the founders of the #1 site for parents of teens and young adults comes an essential guide for building strong relationships with your teens and preparing them to successfully launch into adulthood The high school and college years: an extended roller coaster of academics, friends, first loves, first break-ups, driver’s ed, jobs, and everything in between. Kids are constantly changing and how we parent them must change, too. But how do we stay close as a family as our lives move apart? Enter the co-founders of Grown and Flown, Lisa Heffernan and Mary Dell Harrington. In the midst of guiding their own kids through this transition, they launched what has become the largest website and online community for parents of fifteen to twenty-five year olds. Now they’ve compiled new takeaways and fresh insights from all that they’ve learned into this handy, must-have guide. Grown and Flown is a one-stop resource for parenting teenagers, leading up to—and through—high school and those first years of independence. It covers everything from the monumental (how to let your kids go) to the mundane (how to shop for a dorm room). Organized by topic—such as academics, anxiety and mental health, college life—it features a combination of stories, advice from professionals, and practical sidebars. Consider this your parenting lifeline: an easy-to-use manual that offers support and perspective. Grown and Flown is required reading for anyone looking to raise an adult with whom you have an enduring, profound connection.




Lesson Study


Book Description

Why do students stumble over certain concepts and ideas—such as attributing causality to correlation; revert to former misconceptions, even after successfully completing a course—such as physics students continuing to believe an object tossed straight into the air continues to have a force propelling it upward; or get confused about terminology—such as conflating negative reinforcement with punishment?This is the first book about lesson study for higher education. Based on the idea that the best setting in which to examine teaching is where it takes place on a daily basis—the lecture hall, seminar room, studio, lab, and the online classroom management system – lesson study involves several instructors jointly designing, teaching, studying, and refining an individual class lesson in order to explore student learning problems, observe how students learn, and analyze how their instruction affects student learning and thinking. The primary purpose is to help teachers better understand how to support student learning and thinking. By observing how students learn through lesson study teachers can improve their own teaching and build knowledge that can be used by other teachers to improve their practice.Lesson study grew out of the collective efforts of classroom teachers in Asia—most notably in Japan—to improve their teaching. Subsequently imported, tested, and implemented by a group of instructors of biology, economics, English, and psychology at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, the process proved so valuable that the university has since established the College Lesson Study Project, of which the author of this book is Director.Focusing on a single lesson enables participants to examine in detail every step of the teaching process, from vision and goals, to instructional design, to implementation, to observation and analysis of student performance, and then evidence-based improvement. It enables faculty to explore learning problems that matter most to them, learn alternative ways to teach from one another, and co-design new course materials.This book introduces lesson study practices to college teachers, providing the necessary guidance, tools, examples, models, and ideas to enable teachers to undertake lesson study in their own classes. It also explores the underlying rationale for lesson study practices and how to realize the full potential of lesson study to advance teaching and learning.A Joint Publication with the National Teaching and Learning ForumAn ACPA / NASPA Joint Publication




College


Book Description

The strengths and failures of the American college, and why liberal education still matters As the commercialization of American higher education accelerates, more and more students are coming to college with the narrow aim of obtaining a preprofessional credential. The traditional four-year college experience—an exploratory time for students to discover their passions and test ideas and values with the help of teachers and peers—is in danger of becoming a thing of the past. In College, prominent cultural critic Andrew Delbanco offers a trenchant defense of such an education, and warns that it is becoming a privilege reserved for the relatively rich. In describing what a true college education should be, he demonstrates why making it available to as many young people as possible remains central to America's democratic promise. In a brisk and vivid historical narrative, Delbanco explains how the idea of college arose in the colonial period from the Puritan idea of the gathered church, how it struggled to survive in the nineteenth century in the shadow of the new research universities, and how, in the twentieth century, it slowly opened its doors to women, minorities, and students from low-income families. He describes the unique strengths of America’s colleges in our era of globalization and, while recognizing the growing centrality of science, technology, and vocational subjects in the curriculum, he mounts a vigorous defense of a broadly humanistic education for all. Acknowledging the serious financial, intellectual, and ethical challenges that all colleges face today, Delbanco considers what is at stake in the urgent effort to protect these venerable institutions for future generations.